Page 53 of The Cut

Nathan wrapped his dressing gown tight around him and towel-dried his hair. He stood at the top of the stairs and listened to the silence in the house. Dani had dropped him off at home, bundling him into a hot shower and getting a cup of hot soup inside him before she headed back out to find Lily.

There was something gnawing away in the pit of Nate’s stomach.

Since the beginning of this last school year, around about the time he’d started making the film, he’d felt as if he was under water.

Everything had become blurred and his senses dampened.

He hadn’t really been listening or paying attention; he had been somewhere else.

He’d been someone else, but the person he was pretending to be wasn’t real, he couldn’t be real.

He’d allowed himself to be drawn into Karine’s vision.

He’d let himself get carried away on a wave of imagination, but time seemed to have slipped through his fingers; he’d lost himself.

His mum was absent; she didn’t even really know what he was up to anymore.

Dani was halfway out the door and his dad was somewhere else entirely.

He could run away right now and no one would even notice.

He could burn the house down and no one was here to stop him. It had all gone horribly wrong.

His phone buzzed, a text from his sister:

Where are you … thought you were doing this too?

Dani said no … she’s coming to get you. Where are you? 292

Waiting in a car for instructions from Karine … did you film our Nicki Minaj dance number?

Yeah, watching it now. LOL

Nate began to hook up the camera to his TV monitor to watch the video of Lily, Sam Rathbone and Gaynor Carson twerking to ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’.

His plan was to cut the most embarrassing bits together as a special montage to torment his sister at her birthday bash in September. Happy birthday, Sis!

Nate opened his laptop. Freckles the Bitmoji was frozen on his RetroFX message board.

The last message had been sent two days ago. ‘See ya very soon.’ A cute little wink emoji and an aeroplane.

‘Hey, Freckles,’ Nate tapped on the keyboard. ‘You there?’ He watched the screen, hoping for three repeating dots, but there was no response. Texting his sister and messaging with a cartoon graphic deepened the hollow feeling in his tummy. He’d never felt more alone.

He opened his iMovie program and began to load the analogue footage from the Sony Hi8 camera on to the TV screen, converting it to digital fingernails in three-minute segments.

The old video tape he’d found in the basement was poor quality and grainy, and he wondered if the film had degraded after all this time.

Filming on video felt like he was making some kind of cult film from the seventies.

He’d struggled to keep focus and his handheld technique was a bit shaky.

His iPhone used auto focus on a self-steadying gimbal, but the video camera required a different kind of skill.

Nate sat back and watched the embarrassing ‘Minaj à trois’ come to a bump and grinding end. The audience went wild. 293

As Nate leant forward to switch off the tape, a high-angle shot of the girls’ changing room suddenly spliced on to the screen.

‘That’s odd,’ he muttered to himself. He watched as a girl dressed as one of the characters from Star Wars entered through the door. ‘Very retro … don’t remember filming this bit.’

Nate pressed fast forward and the girl from the bathroom was suddenly centre stage in a white spotlight.

‘Definitely don’t remember this …’ Nate hit upload and let the tape play.

The camera panned slowly around the room; the movement was steady and in focus.

The girl in white began to dance. There was no sound, but her movements were mesmerising.

The translucent white gown draped and floated around her like fluid.

Nate leant forward with his hands on his chin, totally absorbed by the apparition on screen, turning on the tips of her toes.

Nate yawned and looked at his watch: 11.

55 p.m. His eyes drooped as the girl continued to dance; his head lolled forward as sleep overwhelmed him.

‘Oh shit!’ Nate was jolted awake with a start and his heart raced.

He looked at the screen as a nightmare face, grey with rusty nails hammered into the skin and scalp, lurched into the frame. He paused the tape.

‘What the hell is that?’ The face on the screen was covered in a grey rubber mask, mouth open wide, black with some kind of sticky slime.

Nate rubbed his eyes and tried to focus; he advanced the tape forward frame by frame.

As the camera moved, the girl in white appeared again, but now there was blood on her dress.

Nate moved to his laptop and uploaded the next three-minute segment from tape to digital.

As it rendered, the image on the screen scrambled into a mess of blurred movement and then cut 294 to black.

On the laptop, Nate zoomed into the girl on the floor.

Above her head was a banner of red, white and blue painted letters covered in sequins: Pearls Before Swine 1994.

‘Oh my God.’ Nate zoomed in on the face of Annabel Maddock.

‘That’s her.’ He dragged and dropped the thumbnail into a new file.

A shriek like a wounded animal made Nate’s head snap back to the TV screen.

The old tape from the Sony camera he’d found in the suitcase from the basement had been playing on; he’d forgotten to turn it off.

Nate rubbed his eyes and tried to focus; he advanced the film forward.

Fireworks fizzled across the shot, lights exploding in the dark.

Then the camera jerked violently around, as if someone was running or struggling against the wind.

Eventually, there was a series of blurred shots from high above, looking down on to a clump of trees.

He paused the tape. Then very slowly began to rewind.

The focus moved in closer; the subject was obscured with rain on the lens.

He paused the tape again. There in the woodland was a blue car parked up in Doggers Dive.

Nate painstakingly advanced the film frame by frame.

Like an old kineograph, in staccato movements, a girl in white appeared to fall backwards out of the open car door, lying out onto the ground as a figure in black clambered on top of her.

The shot disintegrated again, obscured by rain, but Nate persisted, stepping each frame forward at a snail’s pace.

Out of the black, a sudden pan to the right and the camera was high up in the tower.

It picked up the girl in white again; she was being chased.

It slowly began to dawn on Nate that this was Annabel Maddock on the night she was killed.

It was a recording of the leavers’ party from 1994 and this may have been the last time she was seen alive.

The fight that was happening before his eyes was brutal.

The cavernous door to the ruined Blackstone Mill was open and a few 295 kids in costumes streamed out and ran across the grass towards the cover of the dense wooded area behind the car park.

The camera panned down and zoomed into the tall lanky silhouette in a Pinhead mask.

He was reaching his hand towards her face; the diaphanous chiffon of her costume billowed in the wind.

She slapped him away and turned to leave.

He caught the fabric of her white scarf and yanked her towards him, grabbing her by the throat.

In that second, her foot appeared to slip, and she fell out of sight. The screen went black.

A shaft of light cut across the frame. A fork of lightning lit up the night and a demonic grey face punctured with rusty nails suddenly lurched into the shot.

Nate paused the film and with trembling hands began to upload the images to digital thumbnails.

There was one frame he desperately wanted to look at more closely. The upload disc spun painfully slowly.

‘Come on … come … on.’ The files loaded and Nate froze the image and zoomed in closer. ‘No. Please no. It can’t be.’

The torn mask hung from the chin, flapping like dead skin, revealing half of his face. The eyes were unmistakable, as was the tiny mole just above his father’s eyebrow. There was blood everywhere.

‘Dad?’ 296